Lonely Hearts

By Marion Meade

The best writing about the grim apocalyptic satirist Nathanael West, author of the novels "Miss Lonelyhearts" and "The Day of the Locust," is by Stanley Edgar Hyman. "Nathanael West" (University of Minnesota Press, 1962) reflects Hyman's own awareness of the ambient horror of American life and culture (Hyman was married to Shirley Jackson, author of the chilling tale "The Lottery").

The books of West (born Nathan Weinstein, 1903-1940) are so relentlessly dark that his worldwide climb to fame occurred after his untimely death in a car crash, when postwar French existentialists, always on the hunt for gruesome examples of the curdling of the American dream, latched onto him as a prophet of despair.

Curiously, New York biographer Marion Meade, author of a gallimaufry of previous books on Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Blavatsky, Dorothy Parker, Buster Keaton and Woody Allen, considers West's world to be "screwball," a word usually associated with debonair, 1930s Cary Grant comedies. Twice in "Lonely Hearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney," West's writings are equated with Monty Python, a misprision so staggering that it calls out for an S.J. Perelman, the bitingly comic wordsmith of genius who was West's brother-in-law, to describe it. But then, Meade seems impervious to any potential ironies of misapprobation, having cheerily obtained the online domain rights to nathanaelwest.com and eileenmckenney.com to create Web sites to promote her book.

A far more serious problem with "Lonely Hearts" rests in its original idea, to create a dual biography of West and his wife. The latter's only claim to fame is as the highly fictionalized "My Sister Eileen" of stage and screen, originally penned by her troubled sister Ruth, a neurotic New Yorker writer. West met McKenney only in late 1939 and just over a year later, both would die in the auto accident. Meade's doggedly chronological narrative has them meeting on Page 270 of a 314-page account (with many added pages of documentation, acknowledgments, etc). Yet McKinney's life, to put it gently, was tedious and unproductive, while West's was stale, flat and profitable only because he produced a couple of books of lastingly savage impact.

As a person, West was clearly a stew of rage whose only joy was shooting birds for fun. Meade notes that the ostensibly heterosexual West's writings reflect a recurring obsession with homosexuality, but does not suggest that West might have experimented with gay sex. Yet by the mid-1930s, after a series of bouts with gonorrhea contracted from female prostitutes, West suffered a gonorrheal infection "in both penis and rectum," she writes. Clearly there are limited ways for a man to get rectal gonorrhea, and Meade might have explored what this disease may imply about West's obsessions with gay bashings and other ghastly punishment meted out to gays in his fiction.

Instead, "Lonely Hearts" bizarrely slates some innocent bystanders, like the eminent editor Katharine White, here described as a "dour, switch-wielding schoolmarm." There are even harsh words for the hapless couple of migrant farmworkers whom West, a notoriously reckless driver, carelessly crashed into after running a stop sign: "Impoverished, uneducated, owning few possessions except a car ... they might have been characters in a Nathanael West novel."

Also harshly handled is the 19th century writer Horatio Alger, whose prose was simply lifted by West to make up one-fifth of his lesser novel "A Cool Million." Not merely failing to criticize West's plagiarism, Meade scorns his victim instead, stating that "most of the plagiarized material seems to appear ... in the very section in which the writing is noticeably flat." Screwball, indeed!